IN a time when ivory poaching has gotten so bad that it threatens to wipe out several animal species, a young Dutch designer is creating “egalitarian jewelry” made of our very own ivory — teeth.

    Lucie Majerus first got the idea for her “human ivory” collection after having her wisdom teeth removed. She kept them and soon realized they would make great material for a statement jewelry collection. “Why wouldn’t we value our own material instead of the precious material from other species?” she rhetorically asks.

    “In opposition to materialistic values, ‘Human Ivory’ acts metaphorically for having our own value in ourselves. A suggestion to cherish our own ‘material’ instead of other species’ teeth and reconsider conventional preciousness. What if we mine our own ivory and turn it into pearls?”

    Her own teeth became a ring, but in order to create a whole collection, she needed more material, and since having more of her teeth removed wasn’t a very pleasant option, she asked her dentist to save his patient’s unwanted teeth. Most people choose not to keep their pulled teeth, so they are usually donated to dentistry schools. Majerus also received the lost teeth of two of her teachers at Design Academy Eindhoven, so she had a decent supply of human ivory to experiment with.

    To turn human teeth into appealing pieces of jewelry, Majerus first bleaches them, and then uses a stone polishing machine to shape the teeth into various shapes — molars are thick enough to be shaped into pearls, while incisors and canines are turned into tear-like pieces by removing their original form, taking away some of the disgusting factor associated with removed human teeth.

    (SD-Agencies)